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The drastic move to organic farming is puzzling. Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to experiment first, see the results, gauge and then

The drastic move to organic farming is puzzling. Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to experiment first, see the results, gauge and then expand selectively. That is common sense. I guess when you are a dictator ish government and you rule the country with an iron first, the institutions of the state stop being anything and simply become rubber stamps. This also underlines the importance of self sufficiency in necessities. A country ought to feed its people, provide basic services like power and medical facilities on its own, without depending on imports.

soldehierro 4y ago
Believe me, the organic transition had nothing to do with agricultural practices and all to do with economics, with the logic being that fertilizer was an expensive import, and by banning fertilizer they could hemorrhage foreign exchange reserves a little less. Of course, they also earned a lot less because the bone-headed transition lead to a marked reduction in yield, only worsening the forex problem the ban of agricultural chemicals was meant to solve.
- kumarvvr 4y ago
  I guess that makes sense, initially, on paper. I would guess some organic farming fanatic put put the numbers that fertilizers import can be reduced XX%, and the dollar signs in the eyes of the ruling family lit up (All those dollars not spent on imports can be embezzled)
- HyperSane 4y ago
  A smarter person would have understood that there is a return on investment for fertilizer.
  - MattGaiser 4y ago
    Doesn’t matter if you don’t have cash.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      That means you go broke or into debt more slowly
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Organic fertilizer requires that the N, P, and K actually came from somewhere. Often, that's from something else that used non-organic fertilizer. So if a country goes all organic not only are yields down on the fields using organic fertilizer, the supply of organic fertilizer itself could dry up.
  - SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago
    Nitrogen can come from the air by using nitrogen fixing crops in a rotation, so it can never run out (N2 is the most abundant gas on the atmosphere). The problem is that growing nitrogen fixers take a lot of land time that could otherwise be growing crops. Also not as nitrogen rich as fossil fertilizers (gas N2 is quite stable, difficult to fixers to extract in high quantities). I know nothing about P and K though.
    - raxxorraxor 4y ago
      P is mainly manure I believe. It is residual in rocks but I don't know if plants can use that. Ash is a good source for K if there are no other K-rich fermented dead plants available. You get a lot of both from coffee grounds so someone might have to drink a lot of coffee.
      - shanusmagnus 4y ago
        Number me in the coalition of the willing.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Very honestly, it might have worked out fine - organic produce fetches a much higher price overseas. If its already a somewhat niche product like tea, organic produce might go even higher and make up for the loss in yield. For Sri Lanka, it was the perfect storm of covid decimating tourism AND overseas demand for their produce. Without Covid, they might have been able to stay afloat on tourism dollars until the organic farming thing started showing results.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - elurg 4y ago
    > Very honestly, it might have worked out fine - organic produce fetches a much higher price overseas. This also affected staple crops like rice which are eaten domestically, effectively forcing the country to start importing food instead of fertilizer. It's not plausible to move the entire agricultural sector towards luxury exports by government fiat.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      > It's not plausible to move the entire agricultural sector towards luxury exports by government fiat. .. overnight. Some countries have managed to pivot towards luxury exports, and indeed this is one of the standard things that the IMF tries to make failing countries do, but it's a multi-decade process.
  - bmelton 4y ago
    Sri Lanka is the second largest tea exporter in the world -- if you converted all of that to organic, then odds are good that the organic tea market just collapses. Beyond that, it's easy to get rid of modern fertilizers, but the tradeoff is significantly lower yield. To make up for the loss of yield, you need more space. Sri Lanka is a small island that is densely populated, so space is at a premium. Yielding less crop for the same money might have worked out if not for the pandemic, except for the fact that they domestically consumed most of their domestic staple goods, exporting the surplus. Now they've resorted to importing.
- pjc50 4y ago
  A phrase to remember: "Exports are made out of imports". Almost every export industry depends on an import in its production chain somewhere, which is why trade wars and sanctions are so destructive. Import-substitution planned economies have to be very clever about how they approach this to get it to work.
lanstin 4y ago
The Rajapaksa family gave out jobs based on nepotism not expertise, and weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. It is completely insane policy, as was flatly running out of currency before doing anything about it. It will be a long road to recovery. At least they have kicked out the family from the government, and have a pretty solid plan to reverse the authoritarian sections of the constitution put in place by the Rajapaksas a few years ago. And the movement to oust the Rajapaksas has brought the whole populace toghether in a way that Sri Lanka sorely needs, Sinhala, Tamil and Musliam all working together non-violently can only be good.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  The immediate problem is that the entire legal order of succession (PM, president, Speaker etc) are Rajapaksa cronies who are busily getting the hell out of Dodge^W Colombo, so it's not at all sure who is going to form or lead the next government. There are also a lot of unresolved tensions left over from the vicious civil war that devastated the island for decades, so it's sadly possible that things take a turn for the worse.
  - manquer 4y ago
    not just cronies, relatives , even the Speaker is family member.
  - lumost 4y ago
    Are there any neighboring countries which could reasonably assist in establishing a new government?
    - thematrixturtle 4y ago
      India, but the two countries have a very complicated and touchy relationship. Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, including the Tamil Tigers, was heavily supported by Tamils in India. However, Tamil Nadu (the Indian state) itself has a fractious relationship and the Tigers repaid India's attempt to send in peacekeepers by assassinating Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi.
ktaylora 4y ago
There's a premium that can be exacted from switching to organic agriculture that isn't be discussed in this article. Sri Lanka has a limited land mass available for food production and they mostly export commodities to other countries. We're talking ~25,000 sq-mi. For context, the US state of Kansas is ~82,000 sq-mi. If you cannot physically expand the footprint of agriculture in Sri Lanka to boost revenues, the thinking in government was probably to try to switch to organic to fetch a higher price for exports. The mistake is that you can't just flip a switch and transition to organic production. That kind of change requires a generational change in farmers to pull off, and you will still fetch far lower yields in the interim.
- andrewmutz 4y ago
  If you are short on land, organic is not a good approach. It takes 40% more land compared to traditional farming.
  - worik 4y ago
    Depends what you are growing.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      How's the organic tea market doing? FWIW, I've never seen organic tea in shops, and I don't know anyone that insists on organic tea.
      - gs17 4y ago
        What country are you in? In the US, I've seen organic tea in the vast majority of grocery stores I've been to. Cafes sometimes have it too, but it's less common.
  - prawn 4y ago
    And is it likely that buyers who favour organic produce would be looking at food miles and buying locally? Not sure if that's as relevant at export scale.
nostromo 4y ago
This is a common feature of dictatorships: a boneheaded decision from a central government wreaks havoc on the people in the field that would know better. It reminds me of Mao ordering all sparrows be killed because they eat agriculture seeds. This of course caused a much bigger crisis with insects destroying crops - because everyone knows sparrows also eat lots of insects.
- epistasis 4y ago
  Well to be fair to Mao, sparrows are renowned for their bourgeois capitalists tendencies.
  - rmatt2000 4y ago
    The sparrows in my yard have been exploiting and oppressing the wrens for years.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      The wrens are stuck back in the middle ages. They keep having faires about it.
      - EdwardDiego 4y ago
        That's a golf clap worthy pun.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Sometimes I think a huge percent of communism's economic overhead is simply everyone having to remember another dictionary's worth of current communist truths. To the extent they have less mental free space to actually do work. Even in abridged form... that's a lot. https://campbellmgold.co.uk/archive_definitive/red_book_chairman_mao_1966.pdf https://campbellmgold.co.uk/archive_definitive/red_book_chai...
    - krainboltgreene 4y ago
epistasis 4y ago
I've been reading a lot of Soviet history lately and it provides a source of a huge number of similar agricultural disasters. Both Russian and Chinese attitudes towards agricultural peasants has been that they are dispensable humans, and it shows in how these countries have had disasters: * collectivitzation leading to the Holodomor in Ukraine, mass famine in Kazakhstan, and hunger throughout the USSR, killing millions upon millions through starvation. All the act of a single, paranoid, murderous tyrant. * Kruschev's love affair with corn, that ended up being a crop failure after a few lucky years in smaller trials. This is actually the more level-headed play than Stalin's, but such a large shift, even with a trial, was a gigantic failure. Lately I've been completely enamored with the book How Asia Works lately, and in detailing the success and failure of many different Asian nations development in the 20th century, it homes in on agricultural independence as a corner stone for further economic development to industrialization. Without a broad base of independent small farmers, that have small farms that they can directly profit from, a large base of a middle class can never develop. Large industrial farms, favored both by capitalists and Marxists concentrate power into too few hands and are also far less productive in total agricultural output, even if they they are more profitable. It doesn't talk much about Sri Lanka, focusing more on north east Asia, but I would be quite curious about how and if Sri Lanka's land reforms from the 70s were effective.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  Lysenkoism should be taught in schools as an example of how extremely dangerous pseudo science can be.
  - ampdepolymerase 4y ago
    More specifically pseudo science not guided by empiricism. The line between science and pseudo science is very thin. Scientific theories are often incorrect, especially in life science, but we refine upon them based in empirical and observed data.
    - whythre 4y ago
      You are right, but when results are falsified because of political expedience, that refining process will be subverted or discarded altogether.
manojlds 4y ago
Singapore is doing well right, so not sure if lack self sufficiency is sure shot failure.
croes 4y ago
Seems like the switch wasn't about chemical fertilizer vs organic fertilizier but imported fertilizer vs local fertilizer. "When Sri Lanka's foreign currency shortages became a serious problem in early 2021, the government tried to limit them by banning imports of chemical fertiliser. It told farmers to use locally sourced organic fertilisers instead." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61028138 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61028138
- trhway 4y ago
  >Seems like the switch wasn't about chemical fertilizer vs organic fertilizier but imported fertilizer vs local fertilizer. it is a bit moot point as organic fertilizer can't be practically transported/imported for any significant distance.
tbrownaw 4y ago
> Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to Maybe this is just a result of things being filtered for newsiness, but a lot of our politicians seem to be not so level headed a lot of the time.
hahaitsfunny 4y ago
[dead]
afterburner 4y ago
They wanted to cut taxes. To cut taxes, they needed to cut costs. Not paying for fertilizer would be one way. But of course it would destroy the economy.
- johntb86 4y ago
  In most countries I expect the private sector to pay for fertilizer. In Sri Lanka, due to the currency peg the government was paying for fertilizer. It seems that they chose the wrong solution to that problem.
- modo_mario 4y ago
  Cut taxes? Weren't they more worried about their foreign currency reserves that went to these fertilisers?
paganel 4y ago
> Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to experiment first, We are also not doing that here in the West when it comes to pushing almost of our energy inputs into renewables. Also, see the recent Dutch farmers' revolt and the reasons behind them, seems like not that much thought was given there, either.
cnxsoft 4y ago
As I understand it, it was to improve their ESG score (they got up to 98) in order to spur up foreign investments. It did not quite work out as expected...
shp0ngle 4y ago
Yeah. Europe is learning this the hard way too. We cannot drastically shift to “green” and then buy everything “not green” from our adversaries! Although the crisis is not nearly as bad as in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka now needs to import rice, even when they were an exporter before!
- oblio 4y ago
  Europe had a ton of time to convert. The push was not strong enough, especially during the rather long economic boom (circa 2012 - 2019).
pjc50 4y ago
(The original article is very good at providing a beginner's explanation of forex crises, and should be bookmarked for every time someone wants to talk about inflation) > A country ought to feed its people This is much harder than it sounds, not just for dense tiny countries like Singapore but for much of Western Europe. The UK hasn't been able to feed its population from native production only since before WW2. I see a Norwegian making the same point in this thread; the proportion of Norway's five million people that could be sustainably fed by fishing, reindeer hunting, and agriculture on the few flat bits of the country is probably very small. > provide basic services like power and medical facilities on its own Even harder. Only a superpower could begin to attempt having its own production chain for both of those. Everyone else has to buy from Siemens or Westinghouse, or Pfizer etc. It sounds like you're saying that only superpowers or mega-countries should exist? Would the EU count as a self-sufficiency unit for this purpose? (edit: Singapore imports 90% of its food! https://www.sfa.gov.sg/food-farming/singapore-food-supply/the-food-we-eat https://www.sfa.gov.sg/food-farming/singapore-food-supply/th... - not really suprising given that it's an island megacity with a population of 20,000 per square mile)
- mjevans 4y ago
  Arguably countries are on a logical trajectory to consolidate into economic superblocks, if not in literal than in defacto status. Gundam 00 comes to mind as an example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Suit_Gundam_00 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Suit_Gundam_00 , one of the main characters is a former child warrior from the then severely economically depressed post-oil 'middle east' region, while each of the three economic superblocks has it's own space elevator connecting to an orbital ring of solar collectors.
  - oblio 4y ago
    I mean, Gundam 00 is cool and all, but it's from 2007 or so. Nineteen Eighty-Four (from 1949) literally has Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia :-)
    - bongobingo1 4y ago
drited 4y ago
Not just a dictatorship problem. Look at the halting of nuclear in Germany - a decision made by Angela Merkel after a bottle of wine with her husband according to The Atlantic. I would argue that the current energy crisis was also partly caused by the ESG drive which while laudable in aspiration got ahead of physical practical implementation capacity.
- koide 4y ago
  What I don't get is how nuclear goes against any ESG. It's just fear.
- xorcist 4y ago
  Large scale buildouts of natural gas infrastructure is not ESG. I know it is tempting to pin this one on the environmentalists, but this is on the establishment. Starting with Schröder who realized he could find an easy way to keep German industry competitive and line his pockets and live a comfortable life forever. This is similar to the Sri Lankan situation. It does not matter how you label it. The lack of fertilizer was clearly not voluntary.
  - mannerheim 4y ago
    Sri Lanka has an ESG score of 98.1 out of 100.
  - makomk 4y ago
    Devemoped countries have underinvested in natural gas infrastructure compared to its importance in keeping their shiny new renewable-heavy grids actually operating though - and in particular ESG campaigners have been very successful at blocking investment in natural gas production in most of the Western democratic world. Which has just resulted in heavy dependencies on imports from unstable dictatorships since there's no real alternative to fossil fuels yet. I know the Guardian here in the UK has been pushing for a continued block on new natural gas production that they admit will only stop it being produced in stable democratic countries, even well after Russia's invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the actual consequences of this.
  - 4y ago
cloutchaser 4y ago
> Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to experiment first, see the results, gauge and then expand selectively. That is common sense. Are you kidding me? The complete religious level consensus on the "save the planet" or "climate change" side of the discussion is everything should go back to being organic and sustainable, and unquestionably right now, with no testing. Take a look at the greens in germany, who are still getting the last 3 nuclear plants shut down RIGHT NOW. I mean what the fuck. And this isn't politicians. Politicians just reflect what their voting base want. There is an insane dogma now that anything artificial is basically evil, for many many of the public.
LatteLazy 4y ago
"A wise prince acts within that which constrains him" The issue is that often people come to power based on unfulfillable promises and corruption. So the food supply is one constraint, but so is the fact you promises 1001 bribes and special favours. So now you have to deliver on the latter soon and the former can wait for months. So you do and desperately cling on. There is fundamentally no difference between this happening in Sri Lanka or here in the UK with Brexit and Boris. The only difference is that the Pound devaluing doesn't cause food shortages etc where as the LKR does. In both cases, corrupt leaders picked by a corrupt electorate that think they can get something for nothing.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Awful lot of food banks in the UK, though. A hyperlocal kind of shortage. https://www.macrotrends.net/2549/pound-dollar-exchange-rate-historical-chart https://www.macrotrends.net/2549/pound-dollar-exchange-rate-... : ouch. Hard to believe it was £1.70/$ only eight years ago. The referendum itself slips it from $1.45 to $1.30 and it never really gets back up again. I wonder how long the government will last with energy bills doubling and diesel hovering around £2/l.
denton-scratch 4y ago
> A country ought to feed its people, provide basic services like power and medical facilities on its own, without depending on imports. Ah, wouldn't that be nice! I live in the UK, a country that hasn't been able to feed itself using only its own produce for centuries; Napoleon called us a "nation of shopkeepers" because we couldn't survive without trade. Our staple is wheat; but our wheat isn't as good as North American wheat, and anyway we are far from self-sufficient. We used to export coal, oil and gas; but the North Sea has largely dried up, the coal mines are mostly closed, and anyway coal is sort of un-hip these days. I wish the NHS would stop putting services out to open tender. Private (overseas) medical companies bid for the business, so that more and more of our health services are provided privately, by US medical companies. We're perfectly capable of looking after the health of our population without overseas help; but apparently our politicians don't think it's a good idea.
- kamaal 4y ago
  >>I live in the UK, a country that hasn't been able to feed itself using only its own produce for centuries From the past few centuries, Britain has been doing just fine colonising bulk of the world and taking their resources. I guess the past before that wasn't all that glorious.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
Every common farmer could have told you that you will run into huge problems if you don't use fertilizer on a soil that has been fertilized for years. The soil probably has zero nutritional value for plants and any water will quickly evaporate. It is basically just sand that may or may not be too acidic or too alkaline because of chemical residues. It would take years to prepare the soil. You will also need more land to plant different crops and let it regenerate. Chemical NPK fertilizer is something terribly effective for that matter. It would be a huge improvement to regulate how much is allowed and farmers need to be compensated for the additional land usage to be able to do sensible crop rotations and allow the soil to actually build up nutrition. Overall this could easily take a decade or two. Of course the motivation wasn't ecological, fertilizer got more expensive and there was no money to buy it with. Industrial fertilizer is made from natural gas after all... You could probably also use oil...
collyw 4y ago
Pushed into by the WEF. Now memoryholed. https://web.archive.org/web/20190122012624/https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/this-is-how-we-will-make-sri-lanka-rich-by-2025/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190122012624/https://www.wefor...
an9n 4y ago
> Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to experiment first, see the results, gauge and then expand selectively. That is common sense. > I guess when you are a dictator ish government and you rule the country with an iron first, the institutions of the state stop being anything and simply become rubber stamps. The precautionary principle. I've noticed this is ever-more fiercely applied to anything involving protection of the environment, but never, ever applied to protection of national ethnicities and culture in Western countries - where the mere mention of latter invites being cancelled.
simonh 4y ago
>This also underlines the importance of self sufficiency in necessities. Embarrassingly for your argument, trying to be self-sufficient is exactly what brought on this crisis. Reckless attempts at protectionism and nativism can be just as damaging as reliance on unreliable trade partners. Economic security is very important of course, but for most countries self-sufficiency is either flat out unattainable or an incredibly expensive luxury. Fortunately there are other ways to achieve economic security, the most important of which is figuring out who you can trust, and hedging the risks of any exposure you have to those you can't.
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
> The drastic move to organic farming is puzzling. That's because it was a desperate response to a currency crisis. They couldn't pay to import fertilizer, so the government trotted out the absurd idea of using domestically produced fertilizer. The whole "organic" thing was a red herring to dress up what was a last ditch attempt to compensate for gross mismanagement of the economy. Unfortunately, a lot of politically motivated folks have bought into this narrative--either deliberately or unwittingly--and are using it to attack sustainability initiatives, not recognizing that they're falling for simple propaganda (see cloutchaser's comment in this thread for a good example of that).

soldehierro 4y ago

Believe me, the organic transition had nothing to do with agricultural practices and all to do with economics, with the logic being that fertilizer was an expensive import, and by banning fertilizer they could hemorrhage foreign exchange reserves a little less. Of course, they also earned a lot less because the bone-headed transition lead to a marked reduction in yield, only worsening the forex problem the ban of agricultural chemicals was meant to solve.

kumarvvr 4y ago
I guess that makes sense, initially, on paper. I would guess some organic farming fanatic put put the numbers that fertilizers import can be reduced XX%, and the dollar signs in the eyes of the ruling family lit up (All those dollars not spent on imports can be embezzled)
HyperSane 4y ago
A smarter person would have understood that there is a return on investment for fertilizer.
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  Doesn’t matter if you don’t have cash.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    That means you go broke or into debt more slowly
pfdietz 4y ago
Organic fertilizer requires that the N, P, and K actually came from somewhere. Often, that's from something else that used non-organic fertilizer. So if a country goes all organic not only are yields down on the fields using organic fertilizer, the supply of organic fertilizer itself could dry up.
- SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago
  Nitrogen can come from the air by using nitrogen fixing crops in a rotation, so it can never run out (N2 is the most abundant gas on the atmosphere). The problem is that growing nitrogen fixers take a lot of land time that could otherwise be growing crops. Also not as nitrogen rich as fossil fertilizers (gas N2 is quite stable, difficult to fixers to extract in high quantities). I know nothing about P and K though.
  - raxxorraxor 4y ago
    P is mainly manure I believe. It is residual in rocks but I don't know if plants can use that. Ash is a good source for K if there are no other K-rich fermented dead plants available. You get a lot of both from coffee grounds so someone might have to drink a lot of coffee.
    - shanusmagnus 4y ago
      Number me in the coalition of the willing.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Very honestly, it might have worked out fine - organic produce fetches a much higher price overseas. If its already a somewhat niche product like tea, organic produce might go even higher and make up for the loss in yield. For Sri Lanka, it was the perfect storm of covid decimating tourism AND overseas demand for their produce. Without Covid, they might have been able to stay afloat on tourism dollars until the organic farming thing started showing results.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- elurg 4y ago
  > Very honestly, it might have worked out fine - organic produce fetches a much higher price overseas. This also affected staple crops like rice which are eaten domestically, effectively forcing the country to start importing food instead of fertilizer. It's not plausible to move the entire agricultural sector towards luxury exports by government fiat.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    > It's not plausible to move the entire agricultural sector towards luxury exports by government fiat. .. overnight. Some countries have managed to pivot towards luxury exports, and indeed this is one of the standard things that the IMF tries to make failing countries do, but it's a multi-decade process.
- bmelton 4y ago
  Sri Lanka is the second largest tea exporter in the world -- if you converted all of that to organic, then odds are good that the organic tea market just collapses. Beyond that, it's easy to get rid of modern fertilizers, but the tradeoff is significantly lower yield. To make up for the loss of yield, you need more space. Sri Lanka is a small island that is densely populated, so space is at a premium. Yielding less crop for the same money might have worked out if not for the pandemic, except for the fact that they domestically consumed most of their domestic staple goods, exporting the surplus. Now they've resorted to importing.
pjc50 4y ago
A phrase to remember: "Exports are made out of imports". Almost every export industry depends on an import in its production chain somewhere, which is why trade wars and sanctions are so destructive. Import-substitution planned economies have to be very clever about how they approach this to get it to work.

lanstin 4y ago

The Rajapaksa family gave out jobs based on nepotism not expertise, and weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. It is completely insane policy, as was flatly running out of currency before doing anything about it. It will be a long road to recovery. At least they have kicked out the family from the government, and have a pretty solid plan to reverse the authoritarian sections of the constitution put in place by the Rajapaksas a few years ago. And the movement to oust the Rajapaksas has brought the whole populace toghether in a way that Sri Lanka sorely needs, Sinhala, Tamil and Musliam all working together non-violently can only be good.

thematrixturtle 4y ago
The immediate problem is that the entire legal order of succession (PM, president, Speaker etc) are Rajapaksa cronies who are busily getting the hell out of Dodge^W Colombo, so it's not at all sure who is going to form or lead the next government. There are also a lot of unresolved tensions left over from the vicious civil war that devastated the island for decades, so it's sadly possible that things take a turn for the worse.
- manquer 4y ago
  not just cronies, relatives , even the Speaker is family member.
- lumost 4y ago
  Are there any neighboring countries which could reasonably assist in establishing a new government?
  - thematrixturtle 4y ago
    India, but the two countries have a very complicated and touchy relationship. Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, including the Tamil Tigers, was heavily supported by Tamils in India. However, Tamil Nadu (the Indian state) itself has a fractious relationship and the Tigers repaid India's attempt to send in peacekeepers by assassinating Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi.

ktaylora 4y ago

There's a premium that can be exacted from switching to organic agriculture that isn't be discussed in this article. Sri Lanka has a limited land mass available for food production and they mostly export commodities to other countries. We're talking ~25,000 sq-mi. For context, the US state of Kansas is ~82,000 sq-mi. If you cannot physically expand the footprint of agriculture in Sri Lanka to boost revenues, the thinking in government was probably to try to switch to organic to fetch a higher price for exports. The mistake is that you can't just flip a switch and transition to organic production. That kind of change requires a generational change in farmers to pull off, and you will still fetch far lower yields in the interim.

andrewmutz 4y ago
If you are short on land, organic is not a good approach. It takes 40% more land compared to traditional farming.
- worik 4y ago
  Depends what you are growing.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    How's the organic tea market doing? FWIW, I've never seen organic tea in shops, and I don't know anyone that insists on organic tea.
    - gs17 4y ago
      What country are you in? In the US, I've seen organic tea in the vast majority of grocery stores I've been to. Cafes sometimes have it too, but it's less common.
- prawn 4y ago
  And is it likely that buyers who favour organic produce would be looking at food miles and buying locally? Not sure if that's as relevant at export scale.

nostromo 4y ago

This is a common feature of dictatorships: a boneheaded decision from a central government wreaks havoc on the people in the field that would know better. It reminds me of Mao ordering all sparrows be killed because they eat agriculture seeds. This of course caused a much bigger crisis with insects destroying crops - because everyone knows sparrows also eat lots of insects.

epistasis 4y ago
Well to be fair to Mao, sparrows are renowned for their bourgeois capitalists tendencies.
- rmatt2000 4y ago
  The sparrows in my yard have been exploiting and oppressing the wrens for years.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    The wrens are stuck back in the middle ages. They keep having faires about it.
    - EdwardDiego 4y ago
      That's a golf clap worthy pun.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Sometimes I think a huge percent of communism's economic overhead is simply everyone having to remember another dictionary's worth of current communist truths. To the extent they have less mental free space to actually do work. Even in abridged form... that's a lot. https://campbellmgold.co.uk/archive_definitive/red_book_chairman_mao_1966.pdf https://campbellmgold.co.uk/archive_definitive/red_book_chai...
  - krainboltgreene 4y ago

epistasis 4y ago

I've been reading a lot of Soviet history lately and it provides a source of a huge number of similar agricultural disasters. Both Russian and Chinese attitudes towards agricultural peasants has been that they are dispensable humans, and it shows in how these countries have had disasters: * collectivitzation leading to the Holodomor in Ukraine, mass famine in Kazakhstan, and hunger throughout the USSR, killing millions upon millions through starvation. All the act of a single, paranoid, murderous tyrant. * Kruschev's love affair with corn, that ended up being a crop failure after a few lucky years in smaller trials. This is actually the more level-headed play than Stalin's, but such a large shift, even with a trial, was a gigantic failure. Lately I've been completely enamored with the book How Asia Works lately, and in detailing the success and failure of many different Asian nations development in the 20th century, it homes in on agricultural independence as a corner stone for further economic development to industrialization. Without a broad base of independent small farmers, that have small farms that they can directly profit from, a large base of a middle class can never develop. Large industrial farms, favored both by capitalists and Marxists concentrate power into too few hands and are also far less productive in total agricultural output, even if they they are more profitable. It doesn't talk much about Sri Lanka, focusing more on north east Asia, but I would be quite curious about how and if Sri Lanka's land reforms from the 70s were effective.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
Lysenkoism should be taught in schools as an example of how extremely dangerous pseudo science can be.
- ampdepolymerase 4y ago
  More specifically pseudo science not guided by empiricism. The line between science and pseudo science is very thin. Scientific theories are often incorrect, especially in life science, but we refine upon them based in empirical and observed data.
  - whythre 4y ago
    You are right, but when results are falsified because of political expedience, that refining process will be subverted or discarded altogether.

manojlds 4y ago

Singapore is doing well right, so not sure if lack self sufficiency is sure shot failure.

croes 4y ago

Seems like the switch wasn't about chemical fertilizer vs organic fertilizier but imported fertilizer vs local fertilizer. "When Sri Lanka's foreign currency shortages became a serious problem in early 2021, the government tried to limit them by banning imports of chemical fertiliser. It told farmers to use locally sourced organic fertilisers instead." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61028138 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61028138

trhway 4y ago
>Seems like the switch wasn't about chemical fertilizer vs organic fertilizier but imported fertilizer vs local fertilizer. it is a bit moot point as organic fertilizer can't be practically transported/imported for any significant distance.

tbrownaw 4y ago

> Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to Maybe this is just a result of things being filtered for newsiness, but a lot of our politicians seem to be not so level headed a lot of the time.

hahaitsfunny 4y ago

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afterburner 4y ago

They wanted to cut taxes. To cut taxes, they needed to cut costs. Not paying for fertilizer would be one way. But of course it would destroy the economy.

johntb86 4y ago
In most countries I expect the private sector to pay for fertilizer. In Sri Lanka, due to the currency peg the government was paying for fertilizer. It seems that they chose the wrong solution to that problem.
modo_mario 4y ago
Cut taxes? Weren't they more worried about their foreign currency reserves that went to these fertilisers?

paganel 4y ago

> Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to experiment first, We are also not doing that here in the West when it comes to pushing almost of our energy inputs into renewables. Also, see the recent Dutch farmers' revolt and the reasons behind them, seems like not that much thought was given there, either.

cnxsoft 4y ago

As I understand it, it was to improve their ESG score (they got up to 98) in order to spur up foreign investments. It did not quite work out as expected...

shp0ngle 4y ago

Yeah. Europe is learning this the hard way too. We cannot drastically shift to “green” and then buy everything “not green” from our adversaries! Although the crisis is not nearly as bad as in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka now needs to import rice, even when they were an exporter before!

oblio 4y ago
Europe had a ton of time to convert. The push was not strong enough, especially during the rather long economic boom (circa 2012 - 2019).

pjc50 4y ago

(The original article is very good at providing a beginner's explanation of forex crises, and should be bookmarked for every time someone wants to talk about inflation) > A country ought to feed its people This is much harder than it sounds, not just for dense tiny countries like Singapore but for much of Western Europe. The UK hasn't been able to feed its population from native production only since before WW2. I see a Norwegian making the same point in this thread; the proportion of Norway's five million people that could be sustainably fed by fishing, reindeer hunting, and agriculture on the few flat bits of the country is probably very small. > provide basic services like power and medical facilities on its own Even harder. Only a superpower could begin to attempt having its own production chain for both of those. Everyone else has to buy from Siemens or Westinghouse, or Pfizer etc. It sounds like you're saying that only superpowers or mega-countries should exist? Would the EU count as a self-sufficiency unit for this purpose? (edit: Singapore imports 90% of its food! https://www.sfa.gov.sg/food-farming/singapore-food-supply/the-food-we-eat https://www.sfa.gov.sg/food-farming/singapore-food-supply/th... - not really suprising given that it's an island megacity with a population of 20,000 per square mile)

mjevans 4y ago
Arguably countries are on a logical trajectory to consolidate into economic superblocks, if not in literal than in defacto status. Gundam 00 comes to mind as an example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Suit_Gundam_00 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Suit_Gundam_00 , one of the main characters is a former child warrior from the then severely economically depressed post-oil 'middle east' region, while each of the three economic superblocks has it's own space elevator connecting to an orbital ring of solar collectors.
- oblio 4y ago
  I mean, Gundam 00 is cool and all, but it's from 2007 or so. Nineteen Eighty-Four (from 1949) literally has Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia :-)
  - bongobingo1 4y ago

drited 4y ago

Not just a dictatorship problem. Look at the halting of nuclear in Germany - a decision made by Angela Merkel after a bottle of wine with her husband according to The Atlantic. I would argue that the current energy crisis was also partly caused by the ESG drive which while laudable in aspiration got ahead of physical practical implementation capacity.

koide 4y ago
What I don't get is how nuclear goes against any ESG. It's just fear.
xorcist 4y ago
Large scale buildouts of natural gas infrastructure is not ESG. I know it is tempting to pin this one on the environmentalists, but this is on the establishment. Starting with Schröder who realized he could find an easy way to keep German industry competitive and line his pockets and live a comfortable life forever. This is similar to the Sri Lankan situation. It does not matter how you label it. The lack of fertilizer was clearly not voluntary.
- mannerheim 4y ago
  Sri Lanka has an ESG score of 98.1 out of 100.
- makomk 4y ago
  Devemoped countries have underinvested in natural gas infrastructure compared to its importance in keeping their shiny new renewable-heavy grids actually operating though - and in particular ESG campaigners have been very successful at blocking investment in natural gas production in most of the Western democratic world. Which has just resulted in heavy dependencies on imports from unstable dictatorships since there's no real alternative to fossil fuels yet. I know the Guardian here in the UK has been pushing for a continued block on new natural gas production that they admit will only stop it being produced in stable democratic countries, even well after Russia's invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the actual consequences of this.
- 4y ago

cloutchaser 4y ago

> Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to experiment first, see the results, gauge and then expand selectively. That is common sense. Are you kidding me? The complete religious level consensus on the "save the planet" or "climate change" side of the discussion is everything should go back to being organic and sustainable, and unquestionably right now, with no testing. Take a look at the greens in germany, who are still getting the last 3 nuclear plants shut down RIGHT NOW. I mean what the fuck. And this isn't politicians. Politicians just reflect what their voting base want. There is an insane dogma now that anything artificial is basically evil, for many many of the public.

LatteLazy 4y ago

"A wise prince acts within that which constrains him" The issue is that often people come to power based on unfulfillable promises and corruption. So the food supply is one constraint, but so is the fact you promises 1001 bribes and special favours. So now you have to deliver on the latter soon and the former can wait for months. So you do and desperately cling on. There is fundamentally no difference between this happening in Sri Lanka or here in the UK with Brexit and Boris. The only difference is that the Pound devaluing doesn't cause food shortages etc where as the LKR does. In both cases, corrupt leaders picked by a corrupt electorate that think they can get something for nothing.

pjc50 4y ago
Awful lot of food banks in the UK, though. A hyperlocal kind of shortage. https://www.macrotrends.net/2549/pound-dollar-exchange-rate-historical-chart https://www.macrotrends.net/2549/pound-dollar-exchange-rate-... : ouch. Hard to believe it was £1.70/$ only eight years ago. The referendum itself slips it from $1.45 to $1.30 and it never really gets back up again. I wonder how long the government will last with energy bills doubling and diesel hovering around £2/l.

denton-scratch 4y ago

> A country ought to feed its people, provide basic services like power and medical facilities on its own, without depending on imports. Ah, wouldn't that be nice! I live in the UK, a country that hasn't been able to feed itself using only its own produce for centuries; Napoleon called us a "nation of shopkeepers" because we couldn't survive without trade. Our staple is wheat; but our wheat isn't as good as North American wheat, and anyway we are far from self-sufficient. We used to export coal, oil and gas; but the North Sea has largely dried up, the coal mines are mostly closed, and anyway coal is sort of un-hip these days. I wish the NHS would stop putting services out to open tender. Private (overseas) medical companies bid for the business, so that more and more of our health services are provided privately, by US medical companies. We're perfectly capable of looking after the health of our population without overseas help; but apparently our politicians don't think it's a good idea.

kamaal 4y ago
>>I live in the UK, a country that hasn't been able to feed itself using only its own produce for centuries From the past few centuries, Britain has been doing just fine colonising bulk of the world and taking their resources. I guess the past before that wasn't all that glorious.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

Every common farmer could have told you that you will run into huge problems if you don't use fertilizer on a soil that has been fertilized for years. The soil probably has zero nutritional value for plants and any water will quickly evaporate. It is basically just sand that may or may not be too acidic or too alkaline because of chemical residues. It would take years to prepare the soil. You will also need more land to plant different crops and let it regenerate. Chemical NPK fertilizer is something terribly effective for that matter. It would be a huge improvement to regulate how much is allowed and farmers need to be compensated for the additional land usage to be able to do sensible crop rotations and allow the soil to actually build up nutrition. Overall this could easily take a decade or two. Of course the motivation wasn't ecological, fertilizer got more expensive and there was no money to buy it with. Industrial fertilizer is made from natural gas after all... You could probably also use oil...

collyw 4y ago

Pushed into by the WEF. Now memoryholed. https://web.archive.org/web/20190122012624/https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/this-is-how-we-will-make-sri-lanka-rich-by-2025/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190122012624/https://www.wefor...

an9n 4y ago

> Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to experiment first, see the results, gauge and then expand selectively. That is common sense. > I guess when you are a dictator ish government and you rule the country with an iron first, the institutions of the state stop being anything and simply become rubber stamps. The precautionary principle. I've noticed this is ever-more fiercely applied to anything involving protection of the environment, but never, ever applied to protection of national ethnicities and culture in Western countries - where the mere mention of latter invites being cancelled.

simonh 4y ago

>This also underlines the importance of self sufficiency in necessities. Embarrassingly for your argument, trying to be self-sufficient is exactly what brought on this crisis. Reckless attempts at protectionism and nativism can be just as damaging as reliance on unreliable trade partners. Economic security is very important of course, but for most countries self-sufficiency is either flat out unattainable or an incredibly expensive luxury. Fortunately there are other ways to achieve economic security, the most important of which is figuring out who you can trust, and hedging the risks of any exposure you have to those you can't.

BaseballPhysics 4y ago

> The drastic move to organic farming is puzzling. That's because it was a desperate response to a currency crisis. They couldn't pay to import fertilizer, so the government trotted out the absurd idea of using domestically produced fertilizer. The whole "organic" thing was a red herring to dress up what was a last ditch attempt to compensate for gross mismanagement of the economy. Unfortunately, a lot of politically motivated folks have bought into this narrative--either deliberately or unwittingly--and are using it to attack sustainability initiatives, not recognizing that they're falling for simple propaganda (see cloutchaser's comment in this thread for a good example of that).